


How Kenneth Ford Didn't Break His Engagement

by yuletide_archivist



Category: Anne of Green Gables - L. M. Montgomery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-12-21
Updated: 2008-12-21
Packaged: 2018-01-25 04:40:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,426
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1632074
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yuletide_archivist/pseuds/yuletide_archivist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Story by atheilen</p><p>Why did Ken not send Rilla word of his coming?</p>
            </blockquote>





	How Kenneth Ford Didn't Break His Engagement

**Author's Note:**

> Written for idea_of_sarcasm

 

 

ï»¿Ken Ford tried to write to his sweetheart four times, when word came that they could go home. The first time, he told her how all he had thought about, all that had kept him sane these past years, was the memory of her kiss in the moonlight, and how his only wish was to feel her arms around him again. But what if she hadn't kept her promise? Not that he thought his Rilla faithless--never that, she was the most true and loyal girl he'd ever known. It was just that he couldn't blame her, really, if the wait had been too long, if she'd found another man who could give her more than a scarce-remembered kiss and a few scribbled notes and a brother who never came home. So his second note to her was more diffident. If Rilla wanted to see him, he wrote, he'd be glad to call on her.

But that was nothing less than an insult and he knew it. Rilla Blythe was the sort of girl who could take a baby home in a soup tureen and raise it without a qualm, and who could see three brothers off to war. She deserved more than just pleasantries from him, and she would get it. So his third note talked mostly of home, how he longed to see the rolling hills of the Glen and sit by the waves in Four Winds Cove. He tried to write something pretty about how she represented home to him, but it had been too long since his University days. Unlike some other men, war had made him forget the art of metaphor. There was no poetry in the trenches.

So his final attempt at a note was just a few terse lines letting Rilla know when he expected his train to arrive, not that he could count on being accurate. But that seemed wrong too. How could he say nothing at all about the last three years and the desperate hope on both their sides, the hope that was now going to be fulfilled?

Ken gave up. One never could say what they needed to say in a letter, after all, which was why his to Rilla had been mostly commonplace accounts of his life, carefully edited so as not to worry her too much. The minute he got off the train, he resolved, he would go to Ingleside and see her. He would know immediately when he looked into her eyes whether she still loved him, as she would know he had been true to her. His love for Rilla had never needed words to flourish. As a matter of fact, when he looked back on all the times they had actually conversed, it added up to a few scant hours. He'd spent more time killing men than being a lover, a thought which made him sad.

Yes, that was the best plan. He'd always been a man of action, after all, so it was best to go where his strength was. Think of it like planning an offensive. The objective was to propose to Rilla Blythe before someone else, like that idiot Fred Arnold, could snap her up. Surely, when he arrived at her door in uniform, she would remember him, and then their future would be assured.

There was just one flaw in his brilliant plan. He couldn't do it.

He got off the train at Glen St. Mary and sat down on the bench with a sigh. He'd made sure his parents wouldn't be there; he didn't want a scene and neither did they. He was an officer, a Captain no less, and did not need to cry in his mother's arms like a child. Which was what he wanted to do as soon as he stepped off, seeing all the laughing, happy faces around him, breathing in the air that smelled only of sawdust and steam and wood, not gunfire and dirt and blood.

It seemed faintly ridiculous to him that the world was still there, that people were going to try and live their lives as normal after all, after everything. He scolded himself for the thought...wasn't that the reason they had fought in the first place? So that people could wake in the morning without terror breathing down their necks, and go to bed at night without terror beside them, a bedfellow more constant than any husband. And yet clarity came to Kenneth Ford in that moment, the sure knowledge of an inevitable, inexorable truth.

He would never be home again. Oh, he had returned to Canada and would make a life here, there had never been any question about that. But the sounds would always be too quiet, the air too bright, the smells foreign. He was maimed as surely as the men who came back with wooden legs crudely and cruelly sewn on to replace the ones that had been blown away.

He sat there until dusk fell, waiting for no one.

*

Ken spent the next week and a half sulking. Not that he would ever admit to it, at least not to anyone but himself. He was remembering his war, he would say when his mother asked. He was considering what to do next. And he was certainly doing both these things. But mostly he was sulking, because memories of the war completely overshadowed much more pleasant ones of Rilla Blythe, and because of that, whatever he did next could not involve her. 

People tried to call on him, of course. Chums of his whom he'd known both abroad and before came around asking for him, some of them saluting and calling him 'Captain' like that meant anything. And there were girls, ones he'd danced with a time or two and some he couldn't recall ever seeing in his life. He ignored them all. They were pretty and interesting, but they weren't Rilla.

He heard from someone that the father of Rilla Blythe's war baby had turned up at last, with a new wife, and that they'd taken the boy away to live with them. He couldn't help thinking that was too bad. Rilla had obviously cared for the little boy very much, despite her vehement protests of not liking babies. And if she chose...someone...to marry, then surely the boy would have a better father than Jim Anderson.

The thought of her all alone up there at Ingleside with no one whom she could truly call her own hurt worse than being stabbed in the heart would have. He might be broken and unfit to marry, but he was no coward. The least he owed her was an explanation for why he hadn't come right away, why he hadn't written.

He had faced down German guns and sent men to die. Nothing he had ever done in his life was harder than the walk to Ingleside.

As he knocked, he said a silent prayer to God that Mrs. Blythe would answer the door. She had always liked him, he thought, and would be welcoming. It wouldn't be awkward with her.

He had no such luck. His breath caught as he stared at Rilla in the doorway. God, she was beautiful, a thousand times more so than he'd ever remembered or dreamed. She'd grown up since the night he first knew he loved her, at the party when the world had ended, though they hadn't quite known it yet. I am not the only one who has been changed by this war, he thought. Except that Rilla, for all the hardship and horror she had endured, had grown more gloriously into herself, and he... "Ken," she breathed, and he knew that broken or not, nothing in the world would make him leave her again.

Except her word.

He wanted to say a thousand things, there on her front step. He wanted to say he loved her, that he was sorry he hadn't come sooner, that he might not be the same as she remembered but that didn't mean they couldn't make some kind of happiness. Most of all, he wanted to say he was sorry that Walter, whom she'd loved more than anything, hadn't come home instead of him.

Instead, he said the most inane thing he possibly could, under the circumstances. "Is it Rilla- _my_ -Rilla?" Oh, how romantic, he thought. A silly childhood joke, and one that didn't even belong to me.

"Yeth," she said in the lisp he'd always loved, and opened her arms to him.

 


End file.
